1st time building website ....how do you drive awareness/traffic?

[Jake]

Realistically it takes money to make money most of the time.

Your alternative is to make a significant labor investment into SEO, Social Media, Bum marketing promotion. Or to list in establashed marketplaces that drive established traffic to your page, often a company site is still needed as well. Ebay, Amaon are general marketplaces that would get some exposure, Etsy.com and bigcartel.com are made for creative types (Etsy charges 40 cents per item listed + 6% of sales)

You can write a press release and submit it to a couple of free press release distribution sites, you would probably have to pay someone like prweb.com $89 to get it picked up by mainstream media.

You can send press kit info to jewelry related blogs, maybe sending samples to influential sites.

Many big successful sites spent years promoting the business before making profits.


You load speed is a bit slow, it causes a higher Bonce Rate (people who leave, sometimes before the home page has loaded) You need to pre-scale the slide show images to the on screen size, you can probably make those files 10x smaller.
(clear your browser cache to better get a feel for the first time visit delays)